The SME Story: Rami Darwish, founder and CEO of Arrow Labs

What is the concept of Arrow Labs?
Arrow Labs provides a solution to make deskless work simpler, better and more productive for frontline workers. We work to solve the disconnect by bringing innovative digital tools through the MIMS platform to empower frontline workers with technology to increase productivity and digital contribution to their organisations. The MIMS platform connects workers to the back office from the field and orchestrates daily workflows and tasks to be executed with simplicity.

What prompted you to start Arrow Labs?
Spending close to 10 years in [the] corporate [world], working in technology focused on the public sector, it became apparent to me that there was a huge gap in access to tools between frontend and backend operations. While there were a plethora of tools available for the digitalisation of back-office operations, the frontline relied on rudimentary and archaic tools such as clipboards, walkie talkies and paper forms to capture information and execute workflows. This gap created challenges in the streamlined flow of information, often leading to loss of critical data due to the disconnect, as well as loss in efficiency due to lack of access to real-time information by frontline workers. Something had to be done to address this problem that affects close to 80 per cent of the workforce globally.

Give us a sense of the scale of the current business?
Today we serve clients in MENA, the US, UK, mainland Europe and South East Asia. The Arrow Labs MIMS platform serves top tier enterprise customers in telecom, oil and gas, logistics and utilities. [We work] with customers such as Bnet, Linde, G4S, and DP World, to name a few. The team is expected to exponentially grow over the coming 18 months to about 60 people, onboarding talent in the US, Europe and MENA.

Towards what end will the $5m Series A funding you received from Tim Draper be used?
The strength of our platform has led us to partner with Draper Associates, Global Ventures and B&Y. We continue to invest in developing our AI capabilities to connect data sources, analyse and automate workflows, as well as invest in resources to expand our offering in the US market and MENA and onboard thousands of new frontline workers with the MIMS digital tools. Our goal is to build a global category leader to connect 80 per cent of the deskless workforce.

What are some of the future areas of uses/industries where MIMS can potentially be deployed?
MIMS was designed from inception to serve as a horizontal fully modular platform with plug and play capabilities that allow our customers ultimate flexibility in choosing options to solve gaps and pain points in their existing technology stack from the first lines of codes. We believe what the market needs is this flexible horizontal platform rather than limited vertical solutions.

The outlook for the future is bright with much untapped potential in mining, transport infrastructure, construction and others. Just recently, we launched MIMS Optimise, a machine learning based route optimisation-centric capacity planning and task distribution system to provide an optimal solution on distributing service work orders to field personnel, based on skill, booking time, routes, travel time and equipment availability. We are now exploring new potential developments involving IoT sensors and machine vision technologies that will pave the way for exciting new features in the near future.